#rican

Peace of mind is the meaning of life" -Talisa Santiago (Spirit Seeker) ↗

— Jamie Haden

#life

It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated. ↗

— J. Maarten Troost

#escapism #overload #life

OK, I'll put it like this: I doubt if we will see another All-American basketball athlete who is a Rhodes Scholar. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#another #athlete #basketball #doubt #i

Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men,we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society. ↗

— Lame Deer

#men

...reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead. ↗

— William H. Gass

#literary-criticism #the-recognitions #twentieth-century #art

It doesn't have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There's a lot you can do with natural hair ↗

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#black #hair #race #women #nature

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#hemingway #dreams

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. ↗

— George Monbiot

#bootstraps #hard-work #wealth #dreams

the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die ↗

— Saul Williams

#americans #insightful #insight

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#americans #existential #people #art